ClearXchange Adds New Bank Member

Colorado-based FirstBank is the first non-founding member to join the p2p payments network.

ClearXchange, the person-to-person payments network jointly operated and founded by Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, accounted that Colorado-Based FirstBank will join the network. The bank is the first financial institution to join clearXchange aside from its three founding members.

As part of the network, FirstBank customers will now be able to send payments from their existing account using the recipient’s mobile number or e-mail address and without providing account information. According to clearXchange, its member banks now represent more than 50 percent of the consumer online banking market nationwide.

FirstBank, which has $12 billion in deposits and 115 locations in Colorado, Arizona and California, is the second-largest bank by deposits in colorado.

“The reach of clearXchange made it the clear person-to-person network of choice to bring value to our customers,” said Jim Reuter, president of FirstBank Support Services, in a written statement.

Bryan Yurcan is associate editor for Bank Systems and Technology. He has worked in various editorial capacities for newspapers and magazines for the past 8 years. After beginning his career as a municipal and courts reporter for daily newspapers in upstate New York, Bryan has ... View Full Bio

I wonder if that's a Bank of America thing that the recipient had so much trouble signing up. I don't know if JPM, BofA, and Wells have different processes around ClearXchange and how their customers are able to use it. If that's the case then it definitely puts a dent in the value of the service, which always boasts about how many users they could sign up just based on the huge number of customers of those three founding banks.

It's also interesting that you still wrote a check. I know PayPal would've wanted that payment.

Even some very knowledgeable people in the payments/mobile payments space are saying that some aspects of this (more around mobile wallets) are still in the tech-in-search-of-problem stage -- is it something that consumers really want?

Well that's not a ringing endorsement for mobile payments! Truly, we are still in the very nascent stages for mobile p2p payments in this country, eventually it will become commonplace, and much easier than your experience, but who knows how long that will be.

I've tried to use Wells Fargo's mobile payments feature before, with only limited success. I was able to send the payment, but the person on the other end (a BofA customer) had to jump through hoops to set up their mobile payment capabilities. Eventually they gave up, I canceled the mobile payment and I wrote them an old fashioned check!